Chapter 3

DWELLERS IN THE WILDERNESS.

How deeply are our destinies influenced by the most
trifling causes! Had the unknown builder who erected and
owned these new villas contented himself by simply
building each within its own grounds, it is probable that
these three small groups of people would have remained
hardly conscious of each other's existence, and that
there would have been no opportunity for that action and
reaction which is here set forth. But there was a common
link to bind them together. To single himself out from
all other Norwood builders the landlord had devised and
laid out a common lawn tennis ground, which stretched
behind the houses with taut-stretched net, green
close-cropped sward, and widespread whitewashed lines.
Hither in search of that hard exercise which is as
necessary as air or food to the English temperament, came
young Hay Denver when released from the toil of the City;
hither, too, came Dr. Walker and his two fair daughters,
Clara and Ida, and hither also, champions of the lawn,
came the short-skirted, muscular widow and her athletic
nephew. Ere the summer was gone they knew each other in
this quiet nook as they might not have done after years
of a stiffer and more formal acquaintance.

And especially to the Admiral and the Doctor were
this closer intimacy and companionship of value. Each
had a void in his life, as every man must have who with
unexhausted strength steps out of the great race, but
each by his society might help to fill up that of his
neighbor. It is true that they had not much in
common, but that is sometimes an aid rather than a bar to
friendship. Each had been an enthusiast in his
profession, and had retained all his interest in it. The
Doctor still read from cover to cover his Lancet and
his Medical Journal, attended all professional
gatherings, worked himself into an alternate state of
exaltation and depression over the results of the
election of officers, and reserved for himself a den of
his own, in which before rows of little round bottles
full of glycerine, Canadian balsam, and staining agents,
he still cut sections with a microtome, and peeped
through his long, brass, old-fashioned microscope at the
arcana of nature. With his typical face, clean shaven on
lip and chin, with a firm mouth, a strong jaw, a steady
eye, and two little white fluffs of whiskers, he could
never be taken for anything but what he was, a high-class
British medical consultant of the age of fifty, or
perhaps just a year or two older.

The Doctor, in his hey-day, had been cool over great
things, but now, in his retirement, he was fussy over
trifles. The man who had operated without the quiver of
a finger, when not only his